A Quote by Trina Robbins
I saw the comics in the East Village Other, and they weren't superhero comics, they were all about hippies and all about things hippies were interested in. And there was one page in particular, a full page strip called "Gentle's Trip Out" signed "Panzika", and it was totally, totally psychedelic, and really, I don't know if it made any sense at all but it looked so great, and I thought, "This is what I want to do, this is my big influence," and it was.
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Right from the outset, the prevailing mindset in British comics fandom was a radical and progressive one. We were all proto-hippies, and we all thought that comics would be greatly improved if everything was a bit psychedelic like Jim Steranko.
I started drawing comics, and at first I was very influenced by the whole pop art movement, you know, Batman was on TV and all that pop art stuff? But then my next influence was in 1966, or maybe it was '65, I don't know. Somebody showed me a copy of the "East Village Other", which was an underground newspaper. And... it had comics in it! And they weren't superhero comics.
Comics are not theatre - there's a very important difference in that the reader controls the page. You can linger on a page of comics as long as you want. You can read and go forward and then move back; you can reread, in one sitting or at your leisure. You can take as much time as you want to take in that story.
When I was a kid, back in the '40s, I was a voracious comic book reader. And at that time, there was a lot of patriotism in the comics. They were called things like 'All-American Comics' or 'Star-Spangled Comics' or things like that. I decided to do a logo that was a parody of those comics, with 'American' as the first word.
I think that superhero comics in particular are really useful for talking about big emotions and feelings, and personifying and concretizing symbols.
I was going to be a storybook illustrator or an editorial illustrator. I ended up in a comics class by mistake because all the others were full, so I was like 'I'll stay for one class, and then I'll go take something else, because I don't care about comics.' I got pulled in really fast; I discovered I had a voice in comics that I didn't know I had.
Lots of things that go on in mainstream superhero comics are just stupid. They just show up on the page, and no one makes any mention of it.
The hippies had in mind something that they wanted, and were calling it freedom, but in the final analysis freedom is a purely negative goal. It just says something is bad. Hippies weren't really offering any alternatives other than colorful short-term ones, and some of these were looking more and more like pure degeneracy. Degeneracy can be fun but it's hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation.
I grew up in Northern California, so the hippies were still around. My father and mother were very Republican, very strait-laced and very uptight, but my uncles were hippies.
We thought everybody read comics. We didn't know we were weird. We didn't know people that collected comics were strange. It was as normal as listening to rock music on the radio.
I think comics in New York are interested in being comics. And there're comics in L.A. who are touring comics, who are certainly more interested in stand-up, but a lot of L.A. stand-ups are really looking to do something else.
I think comics are really - superhero comics are at their best and most primal when they're about joy and flying, and about escaping the gravity of the world. But, at the same time, that's not to say all stories should be happy.
I think there are things that digital can't do as well as print thus far. Even an iPad is only 80% the size of a standard comics page, so the images are going to be smaller. You don't get your big, whopping two-page spreads.
There's a Marvel superhero called Black Bolt & his real name is Blackagar Boltagon & that really tells you a lot about superhero comics.
My feeling is that it's one of the very few things that comics can do that you really can't do in any other medium. I feel like the reader accepts all of these styles, and after a certain point you can flip the pages and see a character rendered very differently than you saw on an earlier page, and it's not jarring. It suggests things that you can't suggest just in the writing or in the plotting.
The main difference between illustration and comics is that comics are much, much more work. Every comics page is the equivalent of six to nine illustrations.
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